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Adobe® Premiere® 6.5 Review

Adobe® Premiere® 6.5 is a product video editors and home users can get really excited about using. Adobe® Premiere® 6.5 is for the user who wants a more powerful and flexible progam than iMovie but not the steep learning curve that Final Cut Pro requires.

Premiere® 6.5 is the ‘middle-of-the-road’ application for digital video editing at an affordable price. And what’s really nice about Premiere® 6.5, it’s bi-platform. I belong to a user group with both Mac and Windows users, so when I can demo a product for both platforms, it’s a huge plus.

Let me tell you, there is a LOT to get excited about with Premiere® 6.5. Sophisticated titling capabilities, realtime viewing, clip options, and SmartSound QuickTracks just to name a few. After installing Premiere® 6.5 onto my G4/867/1+GB RAM running OS 10.2/9.2, I gave it a test drive... without looking at the manual (and how many of us really read the manual right off the start?). I wanted to explore to see what was new and improved. First thing I checked out was the ‘titling’ features. That was a WOW! (see Figure 1).

To access the Title menu, go to File>New>Title. (More features have been added to File>New> which I will expand upon later.) After selecting ‘Title’, the Adobe® Title Designer window opened up. (see Figure 2) WOW! I was blown away with all the choices. The word ‘designer’ is so appropriate here because Adobe® has given me so many options and tools.

Titling can make or break a good video project and Adobe® has done a superb job of enchancing the titling capabilities for video editors and home users alike.

Figure 1

Adobe® has enriched Premiere® 6.5 much the same way they did with Photoshop® 7, with powerful, page-layout-like capabilities. How cool is that!

The toolbar (circled in red in Figure 2) offers the following tools:
a Selection tool; Rotation tool; Horizontal and Vertical type too; Horizontal and Vertical paragraph text tool; Path text tools; Pen tool; Add and Delete anchor point tools; Convert anchor point tool; Rectangle tool; Clipped-corner rectangle tool ; Rounded-corner rectangle tool; Round rectangle tool; Wedge tool; Arc tool; Ellipse tool; and Line tool.

Also, you will find a Sync to Timeline button and an Output to Monitor button (circled in Green, Figure 3); a New Style button, and a Delete Style button. (circled in Purple in Figure 3).

Circled in Aqua, Figure 3, is the Title Type and Templates boxes. The Title Type allows you to select Still, Roll, or Crawl. The Templates box allows you to choose from dozens and dozens of preset title formats such as thirds, backgrounds, textures, etc. You can even save one of your creations as a Template!

Figure 2

Figure 3

You can show your video or still behind the title. Notice the faint white lines that surround the word ‘Title’ in the Title Designer window in Figure 3. Those are the safe title and safe actions margins, extremely helpful if you are going to output your product to VHS or broadcast. You can turn the safe margins on or off. If your output is to CD or web, the margins don’t apply because the entire image will show up safely. I do a lot with videotape, so I must stay within the safe titling range so that when the video is viewed on TV, titles don’t get cut off.

But let me elaborate on the page-layout like capabilities that Adobe® Premiere® 6.5 offer. Notice all the items to the right of the safe title window, circled in Yellow, Figure 3 and in the expanded view in Figure 4. This is the Object Styles Properties section which, as Adobe® describes it, “provides several controls for setting and adjusting the styles you apply to titles”.

You can tweak the font, font size, change the aspect ratio of a font size (i.e., narrow or widen the text); apply leading (the amount of space between lines of type), kerning (the amount of space you add or subtract between specific character pairs), or tracking (the amount of space between a range of letters); apply a baseline shift (the distance of the characters from the baseline) for all the text or just selected contiguous characters; slant; all caps; small caps size; underline; distort; Fill, Stroke, Shadow; Opacity; Rotation. (See Figure 4.)

Titling in Premiere® 6.5 has definitely reached another level by leaps and bounds compared to versions 6 and earlier. As far as I’m concerned, the new titling features make it worth the upgrade price alone!

Another terrific improvement Adobe® has added to Premiere® 6.5 has to do with the video/audio track colors.

As you can see in Figure 5, the newly imported video clip, placed in Video 1A track has also placed the audio associated with that video clip in the Audio 2 track. Notice that both tracks are colored green. If you decide you want to delete the audio and/or use that audio somewhere else in the Timeline, you simply select the clip, which automatically selects both video and audio (because at the moment they are linked), and go to CLIP>Unlink Audio and Video (as illustrated in Figure 6). This will unlink your audio and video (see Figure 7 and notice the color change) whereby you can manipulate each independently of the other. Very convenient if you want to use the audio separately somewhere else, or use only a portion of that audio or video, or simply delete the audio, leaving the video clip untouched.

Figure 4

Figure 5

Fgure 7

Figure 7 shows the video in yellow and the audio in bluish green. There are many times when I do not want to use the audio associated with certain video clips. Using the ‘Unlink Audio and Video’ makes it easy to unlink the two. Usually, I delete the audio track because I do a lot of music videos and don’t need the ‘ambient’ sound from the original video clip.

Figure 6

Premiere® 6.5 is full of little goodies. In the clip bin, you have several choices of how you want to view your material. You can view it as ‘thumbnails’ (as shown in Figure 8), as icons (as shown in Figure 9), or as a list view (as shown in Figure 10).

Figure 9 Icon View

Figure 8 Thumbnail View

Notice the little icon of a filmstrip next to the description of the clip in the Thumbnail view in Figure 8. This lets you know that that particular clip has been used in the Timeline. Great little feature that Premiere® utilizes to help you identify which clips have been used and which clips haven’t. The number ‘126’ in the upper left hand corner tells me that there are 126 clips in the bin. That’s a lot to keep track of, so that little filmstrip icon is a handy feature.

Figure 10 List View

To access the view options in the clip bin, click on the right facing triangle as illustrated in red in Figure 11. This opens up several options, of which the Icon View, Thumbnail View, and List View are available.

Figure 11

Have you ever wanted to rename a clip and found you couldn’t, had to go back into the folder, select it, then rename it? Well Premiere® 6.5 has made this a piece of cake. I found that while in the List View, I could highlight the clip name and rename it. How cool is that. This feature has saved me hours of frustration. I recently imported a hundred or so photos from my digital camera. What happens when you import photos? They import as numbered files don’t they. Numbers don’t mean a whole lot after awhile. Using the List View, I easily and quickly renamed them with more meaningful labels.

Another note of importance. No matter which view you choose, the name of the file, type of file (still, video, audio), length of time, and file size are listed. Very convenenient.

One last feature that I want to talk about is SmartSound Quicktracks. A jewel. In minutes, you can create custom, royalty-free, movie-quality, professional music soundtracks for any specified length of time. Did I mention how easy and fun this was! See Figure 12

To access the SmartSound Quicktracks, insert the CD that came with your Adobe® Premiere® 6.5 CD, then go to File>New> then select SmartSound. (See Figure 1).
This opens up the SmartSound window. See Figure 12.

Figure 12

Click on the Start Maestro button. This opens up the Maestro window as seen in Figure 13.

This is where the fun really starts. You need to decide how you want your music to be used... intro, outro, stringer, background, mood, style (Classical, Country/Folk, Futuristic, Jazz, Fusion, New Age, Easy, Orchestral, Pop, Rock, Dance, Specialty, sound effect, etc.

Decide, then click the Next button. Enter the time you want the piece to last when prompted. You can even select whether you want your piece to be loopable (very cool for web projects). As you progress with your selection, you have the ability to listen and test various styles. See Figure 14

Figure 14

SmartSound Quicktracks is fun, easy to use, economical, a real time-saver, and sounds are professional-quality. For the professional and home-user alike, SmartSound Quicktracks will save you money... remember, it’s royalty free! The big thing for me is saving me time and money hunting around for just the right piece of music. Sometimes it takes hours upon hours to find what I'm looking for. SmartSound Quicktracks to the rescue! Oh... and did I mention how easy and how much fun it is?

Figure 13

You can add extra CD libraries to your collection by contacting www.smartsounds.com/music. SmartSounds release new ones every month. Some examples are as follows:
American Spirit
Attention Grabbers
Bright Horizons
Child’s Play
Cinematic Excellence
Classical Masters
Country Jamboree
Drama & Documentary
The Edge Series, Volume 1: Techno/Dance
The Edge Series, Volume 2: Rap/Rock/Pop
The Edge Series, Volume 3: Action Techno/Edge Groove/Top 40 R&B
Electronic Frontiers
Expressive Textures
Global Voyage
Good Times
High Performance
Holiday Magic
Inspirational Guitar
Light & Jazzy
Maximum Action
Mozart & Rossini
Narration Backdrops
Positive Outlook
Project Millennium
Rock Solid
Romance & Memories
Scoring Essentials
Solo Simplicity
Spicy Rhythms
Suspense & Action
Vintage Comedy
World Beat
You can also go to: www.smartsound.com/quicktracks/premiere/index.html for the latest information, helpful hints, FAQ’s, and updates.

To access online help from Adobe®, go to http://www.adobe.com/premiere for help with Product Info, Support, and Training & Events sections, Forum (good source of Q&A), downloads and much more.

Other bonuses that you get with Adobe® Premiere® 6.5, aside from the SmartSound Quicktracks CD, is a one hour video workshop training CD and a terrific 378 page User Guide comes packaged with the program as well. If you’ve noticed, most applications nowadays do not come with hard copy manuals. What a bummer. Adobe® does it right.

Like I said before, Premiere® is the ‘middle-of-the-road’ application for digital video editing at an affordable price. And what’s really nice about Premiere® 6.5, it’s bi-platform. As a user group leader of both Mac and Windows users, when I can demo a product for both platforms, it’s a huge plus.

I give Adobe® Premiere® an A+.

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System Requirements:
Windows: Pentium 266MHz or faster, Windows 98 or higher, 128 MB RAM, 10 MB HD space, Media Player 7.1 or later.
Macintosh:
Power PC 603e 180 MHz or faster, OS 8.6 or later, 128 MB RAM, 10 MB HD space, Media Player 7.1 or later.

Full version $549.95, upgrade $149.95
Review by: Kathy Aanestad, Sonoma Valley Computer Group, Sonoma, CA Email: kjaanestad@mac.com

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